


In Memoriam

by nanda (nandamai)



Category: The Matrix (1999 2003 2003)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-05-05
Updated: 2002-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:09:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/95907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nandamai/pseuds/nanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I don't know how you do it. How you can see all this crap day after day and just keep going."</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Memoriam

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the first movie only. You know what makes writing Trinity a challenge? She is about as forthcoming with herself as she is with other people. Anyway. This is set after the sentinel attack but before Neo learns to fly. I've contradicted something about birthdays from an early version of the film script.

We thought it would be routine. Easy. A simple training mission for our newest crew members. Get inside government building, set detonators on hard drives, get out — no problem. Easy. Only it wasn’t.

**One: Only It Wasn’t **

I hear Neo’s reaction before I consciously hear the gunfire. “Shitshitshit!”

By the time I turn to look, Chance — age in Matrix time: 17; age in Real World time: six weeks — is on the ground, about one half of his head in pieces. Beyond, maybe 60 meters away at the other end of the alley — oh, fuck. One, two, no — three agents, with police backup. Armed. And firing.

And nearer to me, between me and Neo, Zed, our other new recruit, screaming as she takes a bullet. Haunter catches her before she falls. She reaches down to grab her leg, but Haunter is already dragging her away.

“Fuck, Trinity!” Haunter says.

“Go!” I tell them. “Neo —”

But Neo has collapsed on the ground next to Chance. Not injured, I realize — thank God — but cradling the bloody head.

“Oh God,” he is saying. “Oh God, no.”

“Neo, we have to get out,” I say, but I know he’s not hearing me.

The agents are getting closer; Zed hobbles past me with Haunter’s support, trying to run for the exit we know is three blocks away. And Neo still isn’t moving. I take cover behind a dumpster near him and fire at the agents just to slow them down. It doesn’t help much.

“Neo! Now! Run!”

“What if I can fix him, Trin?” In his quiet, vulnerable voice, one I never hear inside the Matrix. And he only calls me that when we’re alone.

“There’s no time, Neo. We have to go. Come on!”

I hear Morpheus somewhere behind me. He’d left the building the back way, and must have come around looking for us when he heard the shots. “Hurry, Trinity!” he says, and I know he’s running after Haunter and Zed. Once the agents know where we are, there’s a chance they can trace the hard line exit — and figure out where the Neb is, just to make an already shitty day even shittier.

And Neo is still frozen. Time seems almost frozen, Matrix time, the way it contracts and expands. I wonder, dimly, why he hasn’t been hit yet, and fire again to keep the agents busy for the second or so it takes me to grab Neo’s arm. He’d been supporting Chance’s broken head; it falls to the ground with a wet crack.

“Trinity, wait —” he says as I pull him behind the dumpster.

“There’s. No. Time,” I say through gritted teeth. “We need to run. Now.”

He looks at me as if I’m speaking Sanskrit. But he runs. And as we round the corner towards the exit, fire leaps from the ground floor windows behind us, blocking the agents’ pursuit.

*

The first thing I do when I’m unplugged is brush my hair out of my eyes. It’s getting long, annoyingly long. I’ve been too busy to pay attention.

Morpheus has already taken Zed down to the medbay to deal with her leg. Chance’s body still reclines in the chair furthest from me. Haunter helps me sit up, then goes around to Neo’s terminal. And Tank is making the call to get Neo out.

I sit, and I wait.

He wakes up, looks around. I don’t say a thing until his eyes have found mine, and then I pin him. “Can I talk to you?” I say.

On Neo’s other side, Haunter’s eyebrows go up. He lets out a low whistle through his teeth — until Tank silences him with a glare almost as corrosive as mine. Haunter is a pain in the ass. But he’s our pain in the ass, now.

The lowest level of the ship is where we store all of the unusable crap we think we might someday find a use for. You recycle here, you have to. Dozer used to keep his still in storage room 1, and the engines are down here, too. It’s loud, and uninviting, and distant, and a little creepy, filled with things that used to belong to people we knew and people we never met. Most of all, it’s private. But the door to storage room 3 is barely shut behind us before I start in. I have never been this angry with him before.

“Dammit, Neo. You may be the fucking One, but I am still your senior officer and you _have_ to obey my orders.”

He sets his jaw as he faces me. “Trinity, I think I might have been able to save him.”

“And what were the rest of us supposed to do while you experimented with his code, Neo? We were one man down, Zed was already injured, and our exit was three blocks away. We had to get out, Neo.”

He shakes his head. “You did. Not me. I can take care of myself. I could handle those agents.”

“Neo, you didn’t even know the agents were there. You just froze. And even if you can take care of yourself against an agent — and today I think that was a big if — when we’re on a mission you need to take care of the rest of the team, too. Jesus, I thought you understood that.”

He looks away, and I have a sense of tangible anger floating from his body, up to the ceiling and away. “I do understand that,” he says, more quietly now. “I just — I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

I touch him now, my hand making the smallest contact with his shoulder. I take a deep breath, too, and force my voice to get softer. “If it had been just you and me, Neo — or just you — that’s one thing. You have to try impossible things to find out what you can do, we all know that. But Zed and Haunter …”

“And you?”

“Well. I can’t delete an agent, but I can run faster than you can.”

He shakes his head, but it’s not in disagreement. Then he sits on an upturned metal crate that I think has been on the Neb longer than I have and seems to fall into himself, shoulders rounded, head in hands. “He shouldn’t have died, Trinity. It was a stupid mistake, I wasn’t paying attention. And what if I could have saved him?”

“Maybe you could. Maybe not. We just couldn’t take the time right then.” I hear him sigh, acknowledging the truth of what I’m saying. “I’m sorry, Neo. The mistake wasn’t yours, it was mine and Morpheus’ for taking them in.”

“No. I was with him. I was supposed to watch him. The team, remember?”

I don’t know what to say to that. My eyes wander away from him for a second, just long enough to notice a box labeled “Grace.” Grace was our medic before Dozer. I haven’t thought of her in years.

“You can’t save them all, Neo,” I say. “None of us can.”

His face turns up to mine. “But that’s why I’m here, Trinity! It’s why I exist. Isn’t it? To save the world?” He tilts his head, his eyes begging me for an answer.

“This is war, Neo. In war there are losses.”

He makes an incredulous sound in his throat. “Jesus, Trinity,” he says quickly, too quickly. “He’s dead. He’s been unplugged for six weeks and he’s dead. Even that doesn’t make you feel anything?”

The words hit me right between the eyes. My fists clench and I know my face has gone stony. “Excuse me?” I say, my jaw painfully tight. But what I’m thinking, before I can stop myself, is: No, Neo, you’re wrong. It’s not that I don’t feel anything. It’s that I feel too much.

“Fuck,” he says even more quickly, standing to face me. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant, it came out wrong. Shit. Trinity —”

I cut off his apology. “It’s okay.” Damn, my head hurts. I find myself pinching the bridge of my nose to make the pressure go away. It doesn’t work.

“I just — I don’t know how you do it. How you can see all this crap day after day and just keep going.” It’s that voice again, one he saves just for me, scared and trusting and needy.

“You keep going because you have to, Neo. Because if you don’t …” I can’t finish. I look at the floor, a little dizzy. Neo reaches for my hand and we let the moment pass. The only sound is the drone of the engines.

It’s so fucking hard sometimes. Finding him was supposed to fix everything. Wasn’t it?

“When I first woke up,” he says suddenly. “In the medbay. You were there.”

I look at him through narrowed eyes. “If you say you thought I was an angel, I swear to God I’ll kick your ass.”

I was right: this makes him laugh, a little. “I didn’t think you were an angel.”

“Because I could take you, you know. Any day.”

“Oh, I know, believe me.” He squeezes my hand. “I asked if I was dead. And you know, we all sort of died to get here.”

I’m suspicious. I’m not sure where he’s going, but I don’t think I like it. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes I think this is hell.”

“Jesus, Neo.”

“Except for you, I mean. You’re the only thing …” His voice drifts off, and he takes a deep breath. I’m glad when he darts off to another new subject. “Does it ever get easier?”

“You make it easier, Neo. For me.”

“Good. I want to. I try.”

He rubs my wrist with his thumb and the air feels very heavy, very full, full of more than dust.

“Neo. Today. Were you doing anything to those bullets?”

“What?”

“I think you might have changed their trajectory. They must have gone around you. You’d have been hit otherwise, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t try to do anything to them. I wasn’t thinking at all. Like I said.”

“We’ll have to replay the code.” I weave my fingers through his, watching the shapes our hands make together. “I want to help you learn, Neo. Just not when there are other lives at stake.”

“I know.” He pulls me close and I wrap my arms around his waist. And then he says, “You saved Zed.”

“Haunter saved Zed.”

“Haunter,” he says fondly, “is a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah, but he’s our pain in the ass.” This has become a running joke only in the two months Haunter has been with us. And speak of the devil — in typical Haunter fashion, he appears almost as soon as we’ve said his name.

“You two done throwing things?” he asks as he opens the door and peeks his head in. I step away from Neo, reluctantly.

“I told you,” Neo says.

“No arguments from me,” I say.

Haunter used to serve on the Excelsior, the first ship that came to help us after the sentinels tore up the Neb. He claims he’d always wanted to work with Morpheus, and while I’m sure that’s true, I know Haunter. Not a lot gets past him. See, Haunter and I are old friends, not close, but friends. And more than friends, once, on a drunken leave in Zion many years ago.

No, I wasn’t a nun. The last few years, a little, after I knew what I was waiting for. But before? No.

Haunter is pale, paler than I am, with this amazing, and disconcerting, ability to move without making a sound. A couple days after the Excelsior reached us, he snuck up on Neo in the core and said something, or so I’m told, about melting the ice queen, and honorable intentions. Later, I said a few more things, all along the theme of “Leave Neo alone,” but not that polite. Haunter listened, shrugged, and said, “You’re really crazy about him, aren’t you? That why Morpheus waited so long to use the EMP?” The next day he asked to join our crew. I figure he thought things were just about to get good on the Neb, and he didn’t want to be left out.

“Trinity, Morpheus wants to see you when you get a minute,” he says now.

“Is Zed okay?” Neo asks.

“Oh, yeah. She’s a little fighter, that one. Machines’d be nuts to go up against her.”

Neo and I exchange half-amused, half-sad glances as we follow Haunter out the door.

**Two: Realities and Revisions **

I find Morpheus in Zed’s cabin, tempting the patient with reading material. At the top of the pile, I notice, is a battered paperback of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Jesus, Morpheus, I think, I know we’re short on books, but that is not a nice thing to do to a sixteen-year-old. Underneath it, though, is a children’s illustrated version of the Greek myths. That’s better, I guess.

Tank is here also, checking Zed’s bandages. Zed herself is propped up against the wall, pillows at her back and under her injured thigh, a bowl of gruel in her hand. As usual, she’s wearing an old knit hat that used to be dark blue. She insists she’s better off without hair, but that her ears get cold. Before we unplugged her, her name was Ameena, which really did not suit her at all.

I lean against the door frame. “How’re you feeling, Zed?”

“I’ll be fine,” she says in her harsh South London accent. “Hurts like fuck, though.”

Zed had a rough life in the Matrix. Here, she just shines, as if this is where she was always meant to be. Some people react like that. Apoc did; opened his eyes and never once looked back.

“It’ll start to feel better in a few hours,” Tank tells her. “But it will be sore for a few days.”

She shrugs and offers me a bit of her goop. “No, really,” she insists. “Good batch. You should try it.”

Tank laughs and I can tell even Morpheus is hiding a smile.

“I think I’ll save it as a surprise for later,” I say.

“Your loss.”

“I’m sure. Morpheus, you wanted to see me?”

“Zed, you’ll call if you need anything?” he asks.

“Sure,” she says. But as we both turn to leave, her voice stops us. “Guys — what happens to Chance?”

Morpheus returns to sit on the edge of her bed, and I resume my position in the doorway. Tank fidgets against the wall.

“We’ll incinerate his body,” Morpheus says. “There’s no place for burial.”

“Not even in Zion?” Zed has never been to Zion.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well,” she says. “That’s bollocks.”

“Yes,” Morpheus agrees, with a glance back at me. “It is.”

Zed looks up at Tank. “That’s what happened to your brother?” Tank bites his lip and nods, and Zed — even Zed — can’t figure out what else there is to say.

*

Morpheus shuts the door to his quarters behind us, offering me a seat with a slight move of his chin. He’s got two stools and a small desk in his room, the height of luxury around here. I find myself thinking, again, about Neo’s words, about hell and feeling nothing.

“So, how’s Neo?” he asks. “Have you torn him limb from limb?”

“You’re funny,” I say. I’m not in the mood, even for his gentle teasing, even when I know he’s trying to make a point. And then I think about what that point might be. “You think I was wrong to reprimand him.”

“No. I think you were right to reprimand him. But Trinity, I also think that Neo sees the world very differently from the rest of us. Not just the Matrix. This world, too.”

I’ve had similar thoughts, but haven’t gotten around to voicing them. “You mean because he’s the One.”

“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.” He so loves being enigmatic.

“What are you, the Oracle now?”

He smiles indulgently, but a little sadly, too. “No. Just a friend, Trinity.”

I remember Neo holding Chance’s head, and take a deep breath.

“We were overconfident, Morpheus. We shouldn’t have brought them both in at the same time, and we paid for it.” Poor Chance, I think, and I’m vaguely aware that the saddest part of all is what Neo said — that we all just pick up and keep going, and in a few years most of us won’t remember his name.

“Yes,” he says. “I agree. We won’t be that careless again. And I’m afraid Neo will suffer more from it than you or I or even Zed.”

I think he’s right, but I could not say why. I shake my head a little, to clear it. Then I remember something, something important.

“Morpheus, we need to examine the code from today.”

“Why?”

“Because Neo wasn’t hit, and I think he should have been. If the bullets were going where they were supposed to go. I don’t think they were.”

“You think he redirected them?”

“Maybe. If he was, it was unintentional. He says he’s not aware of rewriting the code.”

He gets the same gleam in his eye that he had when we were watching Neo take on that agent in the subway station. “This is only the beginning, Trinity,” he says. “We’ve barely scratched the surface of what he can do.”

“I know.” I want to share in his excitement, but right now, I can’t.

“Next time, Trinity,” he says, “we might not have to run.”

But what I’m thinking is: next time, I don’t want to lose anyone.

**Three: Real Life, Half-Life **

Over the next week, we slide back into our normal lives. No more missions, for a while. The six of us aren’t really a team yet — the last outing made that quite clear.

Neo spends most of his time in training sims, and many hours in secluded parts of the Matrix, experimenting. He did change the paths of those bullets; in the code, they arced around him, as graceful as sharks. “Holy shit,” Tank says, when we all watch it. “Thank God we recorded this.” We don’t always keep the code on disk. We have nowhere to store it.

Then there’s a series of fun tests where I get to throw things at Neo to see how he can make them move, or turn them into snowflakes, or make them disappear. In bed one night, our arms and legs tangled together as we wait for sleep to take us, I ask him when I get to try it with bullets.

Meanwhile, Morpheus and I are after another new recruit. This one calls itself Jomei, and we’re actually not sure yet if it’s male or female. Zed’s healing, and learning — she didn’t have a lot of programming skills when we brought her on board, but she doesn’t give up easily, either. Haunter is a pain in the ass. And Tank — Tank’s been taking on more medical duties lately, as if he feels he has to make up for Dozer’s absence.

Me? I’ve been thinking, far too much, and not sleeping well, either. Late one restless night, when I’m sure I’ve been keeping Neo awake, too, I slip out of bed and through the dark corridors of the ship. Even with three sweaters — two mine, one his — it’s damn cold. Haunter’s on watch; I can hear him clicking away at a keyboard upstairs. But I can move almost as quietly as he can.

It’s two hours before Neo finds me, in the mess. He was smart enough to grab a blanket and his eyes are soft from sleep.

He stifles a yawn as he sits at the table. “What are you doing?”

“Cleaning.”

“Does it help?”

“Help what?”

“Whatever it is you’re angry about.”

“I’m not angry,” I say, and he doesn’t press for more. I scrub at a stain in the corner of the counter, thinking about all the industrial strength cleaners you could buy at any corner store in the Matrix: Comet, Pine-Sol, that one with the scrubby bubbles. I’d kill for a can of Comet. As it is, I have to make do with steel wool, soap, and water. We don’t even have Dozer’s moonshine, since Tank dismantled the still. The steel wool makes a terrible sound on the chrome. It makes my teeth hurt.

“I used to do this a lot, you know,” I say. Neo jerks his head a little at the sound of my voice.

“Clean the kitchen?” he asks, amused.

“As punishment. For acting up.”

“Acting up? You?” He tries to sound shocked, but really I can tell he’s thrilled.

“Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Switch and Apoc and I used to get mess duty way too often, though. When we were younger.”

“Wish I’d been around to see that.”

“Yeah.” I reach for more soap, squinting in the half-light. Eight or nine years ago, Switch would have told me that squinting would give you wrinkles, and we would have laughed because we didn’t expect to live that long.

“We weren’t so close at the end,” I say. “At the end, I was closer to Cypher, believe it or not. But they still meant a lot to me.”

I sense him nodding in my peripheral vision, and he forms a question slowly. “So … what’s up with tonight?”

I look at him, wondering how much he’s already figured out. “It’s Apoc’s birthday tomorrow. No. Today,” I add, as I realize that midnight is long passed. It’s not a Matrix birthday — here, your birthday is the day you were unplugged.

“It is? I’m sorry, Trin, I didn’t know.”

“How would you?”

“No one’s said anything.”

“No. They wouldn’t. We don’t.”

We’re silent for a few minutes while I rinse out the steel wool.

“Neo,” I say finally. “You were right, before. When you said I didn’t feel anything.”

“What? No, Trinity, it was a terrible thing to say and I know it wasn’t true. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

Something in the way he says this makes me want to wrap my arms around him, kiss his forehead, tell him everything is going to be okay. I don’t. It would be a lie, anyway. “Well, there was truth in it, then,” I say instead.

“What do you mean?”

I let my hands fall to the counter, but I don’t look at him. “You have to turn off a part of yourself to survive here. And I’m not looking forward to watching that happen to you.”

“Oh, Trinity.”

“Most of us did it when we were so young, we didn’t know the difference. Like Zed — she just moves past it. But it’s dangerous, Neo. To care that much.” I force myself to look at him, and it’s hard, harder than it should be. “But it’s who you are, too. And I love you for it.”

I think there might be tears in his voice. I’m not sure. “And I love you for being strong enough to put it all aside, and do whatever needs to be done.”

It’s too honest, too raw. I’m not very good at honest and raw. “And for other things,” I say.

He breathes a quiet laugh. “Definitely for other things.” And then, more slowly, “But maybe that’s what we need to give to one another, Trinity. To let each other’s strengths make us stronger. I mean,” and by this time I’ve turned enough to see his lazy grin, “aside from other things.”

I give him a small but genuine smile, and then turn to get back to work. Neo has other ideas, though.

“Come back to bed, Trinity. It’s cold without you.”

I’m about to agree when the proximity alarm starts blaring.

*

By the time we get to the core, Haunter’s already gone up to the cockpit. Neo slides into the operator’s station and I hurry up through the hatch. Morpheus joins us a few seconds later.

“How many?” he asks.

“Only two,” Haunter says. “They showed up on the automated sensors.”

I hate sentinel attacks, hate them more than anything. Danger in the Matrix is at least predictable — you know you’re stepping right in front of it every time you plug in. When the danger comes to us, it’s different. There are no exits here.

It’s routine by this time, only not. The ship powers down, and we wait, not quite breathing. I wish Neo was up here with us. And we watch, praying for invisibility.

“There they go,” Morpheus whispers, nodding his head the tiniest bit to point them out in the distance. Only two, like Haunter said, and passing us 30 or 40 meters ahead. There’s no reason they should notice us, except bad luck.

It seems ages before Tank’s voice reaches us. “It’s okay,” he says. “They’re out of range now.” And I swear I can feel all of us breathing again, in unison.

Haunter disappears down the hatch without a word. “You coming?” I ask Morpheus. He is still sitting, the communicator still in his hand as he stares outside.

“No. I’ll stay for a while. You go back to bed.”

Haunter is back in the operator’s chair, Tank is bouncing on the balls of his feet, Zed is biting her fingernails while she watches me descend, and Neo is just waiting, his dark eyes searching out mine.

“Zed, Tank, go to sleep,” I say. “Haunter, Morpheus is staying up above. And Neo … you still need to learn how to fly this thing.” I don’t know why I say that. I don’t know why I feel like I have to reassert my authority now, in the middle of the night, when death has just passed us by 30 meters.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “Come on.” Tank’s ahead of us, already on his way downstairs, and Neo motions to Zed to follow. Once they’ve both shut their doors, Neo reaches back for my hand and guides me into the room we now share.

Inside, he gently steers my back to the wall and stands very close. The heat from his body starts to counteract my own bitter chill.

“You go on because you have to,” he says softly.

I nod. Tears burn my eyes but I won’t cry. His hand comes up to brush my cheek.

We undress each other without a word and make love slowly, our eyes locked in an embrace as tight as our bodies. He is warm and alive and when he moves inside me, I could swear he pierces my soul. And his voice, calling out my name, is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.

**Four: In Memoriam **

I see very little of Neo the next day; most days are like that. Breakfast, an hour of hovercraft flying lessons, and then work tugs us in different directions. But later, when I return to our quarters, I discover something I haven’t seen in years, maybe ever, outside the Matrix. Neo stands with a burning candle in one hand, blocking it from imaginary drafts with the other.

“Where should I put it?” he asks. He’s obviously just returned from wherever he got it, this strange, glowing thing that has no place in our world. “I was thinking maybe the stool.”

I nod stupidly. I can’t remember the last time I smelled melting wax.

“I found them down in storage.” On the bed is an aluminum bucket half full of small pieces of wax. They are all different colors and shapes; some are many colors in one, as if somebody wanted to make use of every last scrap. All of the wicks are burned black. The candle in Neo’s hand is a cream-colored votive with about three centimeters of life left in it.

“How did you light it?” I ask.

“With a welding torch.” He’s facing the wall as he puts the candle in its place, but he turns to me over his shoulder. “The small one. Yeah, it was probably stupid.”

Warmth spreads through my chest and I almost smile. The small flame leaps from the wick. “Probably.”

He moves to stand behind me and pulls my back to his chest.

“For Chance,” I say.

“Yes.”

“I could light dozens of these, you know. Hundreds.” I don’t think anyone even knows all the names of the people who have served and lived and died on this ship. They come and go so damn fast. I’m not old — not in Matrix years, anyway — but I feel like fucking Methuselah.

“I know,” he says. “You can if you want. You don’t have to.”

I don’t need a welding torch. I pull four bits of wax from the bucket and light them from Neo’s candle. The first is for Apoc, for his birthday. Then Switch, and Dozer. Mouse, who was barely older than Chance. Two of the candles need a bit of wax underneath to help them stand up, but they manage. The glow and the shadows are almost eerie in our little cabin, but I stand back and stare.

Then, not quite breathing, I light one more.

“I wonder who had them here,” Neo says, and I don’t know the answer. There are hints of perfume left in some of the wax: rose, vanilla. God, vanilla — not a scent that belongs in this world. I breathe in deep, determined to remember.

After a while he moves the bucket aside and we both settle down on the bed, me between his knees. We watch the wicks until they sputter, trying desperately to survive. And I think, Yes, Neo, this is what we need to give to one another. Exactly this.

“I feel bad wasting them,” I say. Habit. You recycle here, take what you can find, turn it into what you can’t help but need. It’s only people that are disposable, replaceable.

“We’re not wasting them.” His chin is on the top of my head, so I feel the vibration when he speaks.

The flames fade one by one, and I try not to think about the order — which candle belonged to which of our friends. As the last one flickers and dies, Neo and I crawl into bed and spoon into each other instinctively. The fluorescent light is still on above us.

“It’s getting so long,” Neo says.

“What?”

“Your hair. It’s getting long.” He twirls a strand around one finger.

“Switch used to cut it for me,” I say quietly.

I feel his lips touch the back of my head.

“I thought she might. Do you want me to do it?”

“No. Thank you though.”

“Come on. You can trust me.”

I shake my head against the pillow, and the bit of hair he holds tight pulls against my skull. It’s actually a nice feeling, I couldn’t say why. “I think I want to see what it looks like. I’ve always kept it short, here.”

He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, slowly, “Good.”

“Good?”

“I like it. You should let it grow. Not that you would ever consider doing your hair just for —”

“Shut up, Neo.”

We laugh, and wrestle a little on the bed. Finally Neo asks, in a voice full of hope, “No scissors?”

“No scissors.”

“Good.” And he pushes the hair from my neck, so he can kiss me.

* * *

> Story Links: [On nandamai.net](http://nandamai.net/fic/?p=48)


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